There were two great articles in The Wall Street Journal today: one titled “Blockbuster or Bust” by Anita Elberse, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School
and another called “Why We Keep Falling for Financial Scams” by Stephen Greenspan, emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut.
I read Elberse’s first, despite the fact that Greenspan’s appeared on the front page of the Weekend Journal. You’ll understand why: Elberse’s piece had as its irresistible subtitle “Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books.”
Did I have a choice? No. I swallowed the piece whole.
This is a subject: 1. close to my heart; 2. one which keeps me eating that same heart OUT as I try to comprehend why Sarah Silverman (attractive as she is, and as much as I enjoyed her video “I’m F***ing Matt Damon” as well as her video “The Great Schlep”) received a $2.5-million dollar advance for a first book.
I mean, I genuinely understand why Tiny Fey deserves $17-billion — or however much she’s getting — because she’s a proven writer. She’s written lots of pages of, well, writing. But Silverman? She performs — and she’s great at it. But $2.5-million as a chance to see whether she translates onto the page?
But Elberse explained in clear, precise terms (as heartbreaking, scary, demoralizing, unnerving, unfair, and — misery of misery — as absolutely predictable as it might seem) why “the blockbuster strategy remains the most sensible approach to lasting success.”
Sigh.
Only after I struggled with concepts of the industry as an “informed crapshoot” (as one publishing executive put it) and the idea that “Even if they (the publishers) could develop extraordinary competence in finding gold in the ‘slush pile’ of hundreds of pieces of unsolicited material received each week, the dividends would be limited,” did I turn to Greenspan’s article on how ordinarily sensible folks can get lured into financial debacles.
The two articles seemed to echo one another — I saw the same forms of seduction and ignorance playing on the emotions and hopes of vulnerable investors as the ones playing on the emotions and hopes of writers (all of whom are incredibly vulnerable, except maybe for Sarah Silverman). Investors and writers are all looking for a break, an “in,” a connection to the lifeline, pipeline, sure thing, and blockbuster — even on a smallish scale.
And that’s was the appeal, in part, of Madoff’s scheme, according to Greenspan, who himself invested in one of Madoff’s scams. Greenspan uses his own case to illustrate parts of his argument concerning the lure of the leg up — even if the leg isn’t FAR up.
My impression is this: Madoff was like an elusive, prestigious, independent publisher who wanted YOUR literary fiction even though everybody else told you nobody was buying literary fiction these days. Everybody else told you to write books about dogs (Marley) and cats (Dewey) but Madoff said, no, no, you’re the next Roth, Updike, Proulx, and Winterson all blended together in a perfectly marvelous mix and he, only he, could guarantee you a devoted, if select, audience.
You’re a good writer. You deserve the kind of return on your investment this publisher promises. You believe.
That’s the key: Like Muldar from the X Files, we Want To Believe.
What I couldn’t believe was how couple of pages in The WSJ could give me so much to think about on one winter afternoon.
